The LA Podcast

About LA Podcast

A casual weekly podcast which covers the news, policies, and major issues facing Los Angeles, a city which is both staggeringly complex and culturally oversimplified.

The Hosts

Scott Frazier

Scott’s interest in local and state government grew out of his experience during the Great Recession. He started the blog Red Line Reader to cover the administration of the Los Angeles Metro system and has written about transportation policy for Urbanize LA and nonprofit advocacy groups like Investing in Place and Los Angeles Walks. In 2018, he graduated with honors from the Master of Public Administration program at California State University, Los Angeles.

A lamentable and ever-growing proportion of his memory is given over to the authorship of California state laws from the last 50 years.

Scott currently works as a product manager at an LA-based tech firm that makes software for public transportation dispatchers. After spending his early years in Los Angeles and northern Virginia, he lived for most of his childhood in southern Arizona. He returned to Los Angeles in 2012 with his partner Sarah. Scott and Sarah live in Silver Lake where they share their one bedroom apartment with two cats and two dogs.

Alissa Walker

Alissa Walker connects people with where they live through writing, speaking, and walking. As the California contributor to Curbed, she writes about Los Angeles, and sometimes other places, for New York Magazine.

For her writing on design and urbanism, Alissa has been named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and Journalist of the Year by Streetsblog Los Angeles. In 2012 her project Good Ideas for Cities was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2015 she received the Design Advocate award from the LA chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She is also the co-founder of design east of La Brea, a nonprofit that has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants supporting its LA design events.

Alissa lives in Historic Filipinotown, where she is a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.

Rachel Reyes

Rachel Reyes is a community organizer born and raised in Pacoima. She is a sixth generation Angeleno and proud Dodgers fan. Rachel began her organizing journey as a teenager with the Bus Riders Union and has since worked with various labor and electoral campaigns around Los Angeles and abroad. Her dedication to local politics has improved the lives of people across LA, from passing policies like Fair Workweek to electing City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Rachel began her professional career in museum education, working for the Natural History Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery in London.

Rachel is a two-time Getty Scholar and holds a B.A. in Art History and Ethnic Studies from Mills College.

Her activism seeks to improve and defend Angelenos and their right to the city.

She acknowledges Richard Montañez as the creator of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.